Women & Freedom

Jill Carroll was released from captivity in Iraq three months after she was kidnapped. Her captors released a tape soon after her capture of her sobbing, clearly fearing for her life, begging the U.S. to listen to the demands of her captors and free all Iraqi women they were holding. Shortly before her release she made another tape in which she praised her captors and said they were fighting a just war and would eventually defeat the American aggressors. And since her release she has said she was well treated by those who held her.

As one would expect, those who still support our Iraq adventure - a precious few mostly on the far religious right - have already vilified Ms. Carroll, calling her a potential suicide bomber and even suggesting that she might be carrying the child of one of her captors. Reminiscent of the language of segregationists in the American south during the civil rights movement. After Viola Liuzzo was killed by Klansmen who fired at her as she was driving people back from a demonstration, J. Edgar Hoover tried to portray her as a bad person by telling President Johnson that she appeared to be sitting very close to the negro young man in the front seat (the car was crowded), as if it was a "necking party."

It may or not be stretching the point to set this alongside the scandal that has broken this week with the Duke University lacrosse team and the young black woman who claimes to have been gang raped by several of them after she did what sounds like a strip tease dance at a party in their house.

Since I am male, and have the hormones and primitive drives of most males, I do understand this male confusion about female sexuality and the power it seems to give to women over men. Women of course see it as exactly the opposite, understandably.

In impolite company we used to refer to sexy women who would not have sex with us as prick-teasers. What we meant by that is that we thought women should either be obviously chaste, unavailable, or promiscuous. In other words we thought we had the right to dictate how woemn should affect us.

What I have learned since is that human beings have the right, under any and all circumstances, to decide when and how they wish to relate to other human beings. A woman who walks down a busy street naked may be inappropriate, but she is still not fair game for any horny man who wants to have sex with her.

I suspect the reason we men are suspicious of women is because of their mysterious power to regenerate. We have a role in that - though now they can just about eliminate us - but nothing like theirs. So when Jill Carroll seems to give aid and comfort to the enemy - even under circumstances in which most of us would do the same - we pick on her sexuality. And when a stripper is exploited by drunk men, we say she used her power to tease them.

Autonomy and freedom, issues that led people to take huge risks when founding this nation - and for which we claim to have fought every war - require guarding the integrity of everyone, whatever their gender, race or chosen identity.

Immigration

I suppose I am a snob. I am a white Anglo who went to NE boarding school, an Ivy League college, seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent my career in four churches that were in WASP enclaves. Never mind that I always felt like an outsider, like I was there because of a series of accidents. I went to boarding school because my father had a job in the Philippines so I needed to come to this country for high school and board. I went to Penn because my friends did (this was 1959). Going to seminary and getting ordained in this days - today it is an onerous process I could never survive - was pretty easy if you were even remotely "normal." Meaning fit the old mold.

Still, at least to all outward appearances, I belonged. And I liked it that way. But I never quite got comfortable, always felt as if I was posing.

One day a woman came for pastoral counseling because she just knew she would never be in the in-group in the community. During the course of the conversation she poured her heart out about all the secret dreads and indiginities she secretly suffered mingling with those "to the manor born." As the conversation closed she told me she would give anything to be like Alice Alexander whom she envied for so comfortably and easily fitting in among the privileged few.

A half hour after she left, Alice Alexander came to talk to me about her feelings of not belonging.

The national debate we are having about immigration has focused on the economic issues. Are the illegal immigrants taking American jobs and taxing our health and education systems, impoverishing our nation while reproducing faster than us?

Important questions. But what we aren't looking at is our fear of being changed. It's an odd, off-beat concern for we Americans because none of us are more than a few generations from being immigrants ourselves. We talk about this country being a Christian nation but it turns out most of the first immigrants, though they may have been believers, were looking to form a nation in which there was no pressure to conform to any particular belief or church.

Whether it is essential that we all speak English or all aspire to backyard barbecues I doubt but don't know. For over 200 years the United States has been the place one could go when either times were tough in one's native country or one was too different to be tolerated there. We have every sort and condition here and that has been our strength.

But we are human and so we are insecure, seeking assurance that we belong. And that desperation can lead us to despise and want to exclude the stranger.

Piling On

When I talk to my financial advisor about trends in the market, he is always skeptical. He goes with the notion that the market will do whatever it needs to to confound the most people. Now despite his fierce commitment to free markets and the belief - it has always seemed a little hare-brained to me - that markets left to their own devices will do better for most people than markets that are regulated, he remains doubtful that a big move by a lot of people represents wisdom.

While I do not share his confidence in the fair flow of capital if left alone - and I regard the concept as an untried myth - I do agree that trends are often more about yesterday's wisdom than about a good forecast of what lies ahead. By the time most of us catch on, the trend has run its course and is on to the next big thing.

I certainly find that in fashion. It took me decades to feel comfortable in jeans for other than working outside. Now that I wear them every day to my writing station, I am told they are passe.

I am happy to see so many people, even politicians of his own party and persuasion within his party, turning against President Bush, particularly, but not only, about Iraq. But crowds are not brave and this piling on likely indicates that he is through as the one who can set the course, and that it is now going to be incredibly difficult to figure out how best to extricate ourselves from our failed attempt to mold Iraq into our friendly base in the oil rich mideast. Unlike Viet Nam, we cannot simply leave, because we continue to have vital interests in the region so long as we continue to be the biggest guzzlers of energy on the planet. And Iran has taken advantage of both our ongoing need for that oil and our inept if not disastrous adventure, by rattling their nuclear sword knowing we must now be cautious about how we move in that region.

While I am glad to see the shift in opinion and power away from those who have believed we can use our undisputed power to intimidate the world into going our way, this seemingly massive shift among our electorate likely signals some bad decision making ahead.

What would I do if I were charged with deciding how to proceed? Aside from focusing resources - vast Marshall Plan type resources - on developing alternate energy sources and Sierra Club type ingenuity in learning new habits for conserving energy, I don't know. I would hope we could signal nations of the middle east that we have been humbled by our Iraq debacle and we're now ready to take some new tack. Could we warn Israel that we are not the undisputed power, able to do as we please nation and they need to make plans accordingly?

But I fear that may be dreaming. Now that we, the herd, has shifted, the politicians will be running for the exits from Iraq and it will be chaos, not considered.

Perspective

So astronomers are very excited about being able, they think, to reconstruct from images from a satelite circling the moon, the first few seconds of time in our universe.

Yes, there seems to have been a big bang (what came before the big bang?) and in the following millisecond, a growth spurt so vast it would, in the words of one scientist, concern any child's parent. If I have even a remote notion of what they are saying, a dot too small for the naked eye to see, a dot that somehow enclosed all the matter present in our universe today, exploded and its contents flew into every corner of what we now call our universe faster than you can blink.

How did all that stuff fit in there? And where did it come from?

Apparently this is the other shoe astronomers have been waiting to see drop since the first pictures were seen from the satelite three years ago. The suspense has been nearly unbearable, while the rest of us have been focusing on earthly matters. One scientist, who was at a conference on an isalnd in the Pacific when the pictures were first distributed - over the internet I suppose - was said to be so pleased and thrilled that he was seen to be walking the beach singing happily to himself.

The earth - our tiny piece of all this - is undergoing some sort of significant climate change, some of which may well be part of some inevitable cycle, and part of which is undeniably of our own doing. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we have been poisoning our own nest, putting particulate matter and carbon dioxide into the air, and it has affected the amount of sunlight that gets through to us and the amount of heat that reflects back off our surface into the atmosphere.

Some say it is irreversible and we are headed - ironically since it is climate warming that gets all the press - for a new ice age that will last 150,000 years and make the earth uninhabitable for our species.

Now I would personally hate to see our species come to its end, even though I understand that nothing is forever and that our species, like virtually every phenomenon is transitory. And I have grandchildren whom I hope will live out their days as I nearly have mine.

But it cheers me up to think about all this in light of that instant all those billions of years ago in whcih whatever it looked like would not have caused the most optimistic among us to imagine the scene I see out my window.

We humans quite naturally read all the evidence as being focused on us, how we are doing and what our prospects are. This big old universe may well be onto the next big thing.

Not Buying It

This morning I read a review of "Not Buying It; My Year Of Not Shoppin" - who knows, I might even buy the book or, imagine, read it.

A woman and her husband, tired of feeling manipulated by the consumer culture, decided to stop buying stuff, at least stuff they didn't absolutely need. They did it for a year and, apparently, with only a slip or two, which would be a good record even for a recovering alcoholic.

She writes that it was incredibly hard. The hardest part wasn't doing without what they didn't buy - that really was mostly a relief - but turning down their friends when they suggested going for a cup of coffee or dinner out or a movie. They had no idea how much of their social life revolved around spending that kind of money.

I bet most of us, if asked if we would prefer life with illusion and distraction or life without them, with only what we sometimes call nevessity and reality, would piously answer that we like life straight on, without the beer ads and promises for losing weight.

But in fact it is those illusions and distractions that not only smooth the hard edge of reality, but give us the endorphin rush that creates what we like to call optimism, good feeling. Even if it is illusion.

The trick is how to live a life of sufficient discipline so that we can choose our distractions and illusions, knowing we are choosing them, rather than be run by them so we come to think they are necessary.

There is an old theological distinction between the esse and the bene esse, what is essential and what is nice to have.

The woman who wrote the book discovered that keeping one's head clear about which is which is pretty hard in this culture which has raised creating appetites to a fine art form.

Spening time in a developing country is perhaps the fastest way to get in touch with the fatness of our land. When we lived in Zimbabwe in 1984, we left out tennis rackets behind when we left because they couldn't buy them there. When we went to the mall to buy new ones, we faced a huge wall displaying scores of different rackets. We looked at each other and then fled the store, unable to cope with such abundant choice.

Do you suppose a clever government could use the same techniques to sell us something more consequential, like a war?

Turns out very few of us have the courage and self-discipline not to buy.

Belief & Endorphins

The issue of religious belief is complex. I have gone through so many different stages myself that I do understand many sides of the issue. The first thing that must be said is that we can never have a conclusive conversation about the object of belief, since, by definition, it is about something beyond empirical verification.

Recently I have read a spate of articles, by anthroplogists, neuroscientists, sociologists, some believers themselves, some not. One thing they seem to agree on is that believing in some religious dogma seems to cause one to release endorphins, and endorphins make us feel better.They assume there has to be some use for belief since it has hung on in us for so long.

But that says nothing about the willingess, tearing at us right now, of people to turn on other people who do not share their beliefs. That, I suppose, would be a study of the use of war in forwarding some piece of the human desire.

And what about the issue of the object of belief? Is it enough to believe in order to get the endorphin rush even if you feel the object of belief is a sham? Does the placebo effect work if you know you are getting a placebo?

Democrat?

I have been a card carrying Democrat since Adlai Stevenson ran for President in 1952.

My father was a Republican businessman which likely had a lot to do with my first identifying myself as a Democrat.

I have believed that the Democrats, since FDR, make certain that the weakest in our country are looked after. Though I understand the Republican wish for government to get out of the way so ambitious and clever people can make money without being taxed to death or frustrated by over regulation, it seems common sense that those people will always find ways to prosper. The measure of a a great country is how it cares for those who, for whatever reason, drop off the radar screen.

So I have found it shocking, now that I live on Social Security, a pension and the proceeds of a modest portfolio, to look at the employment figures each month, and the wage numbers, worrying that if they are too strong, if workers have plenty of jobs and their wages are rising, interest rates are likely to rise, the stock market will languish and my income is likely to fall.

Bill Clinton tried, with modest success, to identify the Democratic Party with middle class America by curbing welfare and sponsoring our participation in the global market place. Many Democrats - and I was sometimes among them - felt this was where Clinton's so-called triangulation, while politically effective, dropped some of the old Democratic constituents below the safety net.

I think the global markeplace is inevitable; the Internet makes that clear. But there are still many in this country - and this now stretches into the old middle class - who are steadily falling behind. I hope I will have enough money to live out my days with a decent income, but it is high time we put our best minds to work figuring out how to include more people at the bottom of the economic ladder in the radically changed world of commerce.

There is an agenda worthy of the Democratic Party.

Impeach Bush?

My home state of Vermont runs by town meeting. Every year about this time the towns convene a meeting at which they pass a budget for the coming year and discuss various other issues. So far four towns have passed resolutions asking Bernie Sanders, Vermont's sole Representative, to introduce a resolution of impeachment of the President. Sanders has responded by saying that, while this president has done terrible things, perhaps even illegal impeachable offenses, the Republican majorities in both houses makes such a thing futile.

Sanders has sponsored some even less probable efforts in the past, but this year he is running for Senate and, understandably, wishes not to offend any more voters than necessary.

Though I believe one can make a strong case for impeachment of George Bush, I have worried over the implications of impeaching two presidents in a row, of making even more bitter the partisan divide in the country and, in the unlikely possibility of actually convicting him, of finding ourselves with Dick Cheney as president.

I have since been persuade that, despite all those serious concerns, it would be good for the country if a bill of impeachment were introduced and debated. It may be our one chance left to rescue the dregs of democratic government from the clutches of the oligarchy that has effectively muffled and intimidated the entire country, citizens and elected representatives alike.

Please, Congressman Sanders, step up.